Converting Wiki to Notes breaks Teams organization

41844108 256

Because Teams has no functionality to organize anything beside manually entering content in the correct order the first time, the act of converting a wiki fails to keep the OneNote wiki in the right spot and therefore upends the organization of the team with absolutely no method to fix. For instance in each of my channels I have a wiki in the first tab. The only way to do this since MS never designed any means for structuring Teams is to organize all all the content outside MS, then manually move all the content into each tab one by one and hope the order doesn't change.

Obviously this is unnecessarily tedious and showcases how bad MS is as designing their products, but now that MS decided to suddenly end support of wiki and thrust us in to chaos as we stop working so we can rebuild our teams, we will need to completely rebuild each channel.

My strategy is to duplicate each channel one by one, rename them to something like channel2, then manually copy the content from each tab into new tabs in the new channel. Because this is a worldwide channel I can probably do this at 3am. This is obviously completely unnecessary but it's the only option because MS just jsusn't bother to allow us any means to organize content.

Let me know if you have any other recommendations, but I doubt it. Yes I left feedback but this insanely short notice on the end of Wiki sort of caused me to stop working and do a ton of work to make a slightly crappier version of something I've spent 6 months putting together.

SokiGuo-MSFT 23,241 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2023-05-26T05:29:57.4166667+00:00

Hi @41844108

Exporting wikis to OneNote does not change the original chapter order, nor does the order of all content. After exporting, the tab will still have the option of wiki.
41844108 256 Reputation points

2023-05-26T15:10:55.5366667+00:00

No, it is absolutely impossible to control the order of the TABS on teams. About three months ago I wanted to add a tab in the second position. and I had to delete all the tabs and copy the contents of each into a text editor, then re-add the tabs one-by-one to rebuild several wiki pages and other content in tabs.

The TAB ORDER problem is a problem again because when you convert a Wiki page to OneNote it pushes the the replacement tab to the last tab. I have no choice but to again delete all the tabs and manually replace them if I want the most important information first. This is wild amount of work to compensate for MS's negligent design.

I suspect information hierarchy and communication design is not a design skill MS engineers got in their .NET courses in college, and of course MS doesn't have a design team or QA team to notice that it's not possible to control how information is presented.

Furthermore Notes has no concept of the chapters at all. So above, I explain why I need to rebuild the channel, no I will explain why I need to rebuild each Wiki tab, meticulously... This decision to end support of Wiki is like dropping bombs on our Teams. I have to pick up the pieces and rebuild from scratch, that's worse than negligent design. I think we need to bill MS for this lost time.

First chapters are completely lost. It's clear that the convert tool is not designed to do this. A wiki with 20 chapters, only has one chapter in OneNote. The entire table of contents is lost so I guess I need to write that manually at the top or breakup 1 wiki into 20 OneNote pages and hope that method works. Next it's got a whole column on the far right that's wasting a lot of space and is just a redundant title, and provides no hierarchical structure and is useless in rebuilding the channel.
41844108 256 Reputation points

2023-05-26T15:16:17.89+00:00

Even in your image you show "pages", that's a misunderstanding of what content was in the Wiki prior to export. That OneNote shows 3 different Wiki pages, and the sections of each wiki are gone, so even though there are two levels of hierarchy it's not helpful.

It's like if you asked me what's my address and I say "Earth, North America" -- well that's not helpful.
Nivedipa-MSFT 2,806 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2023-05-29T06:32:14.7733333+00:00

@41844108 - We are mainly responsible for Microsoft Teams app development related issues.

For Microsoft Teams product issues/failures your tenant Admin can reach out to Microsoft 365 Product Support.

For general questions about Microsoft Teams please post your question on Microsoft Teams Community.
SokiGuo-MSFT 23,241 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2023-05-30T06:20:30.56+00:00

Hi@41844108

As mentioned above, this is by design. Feedback on product features can be raised in Teams UserVoice or by contacting Microsoft 365 Product Support. Thank you for your understanding and patience!
41844108 256 Reputation points

2023-05-30T14:28:26.38+00:00

This is not design. I have a master's degree in design. If this is designed this way, it was designed intentionally to break our existing Teams organization.

In no context is being unable to control the order of information a good design. It's absolutely insulting you'd punt this wildly broken hack for an unnecessary retooling of our communication infrastructure on the designers. Gross.

1 answer

41844108 256 Reputation points

2023-05-30T14:36:03.83+00:00

Nivedipa-MSFT, our admins do not deal with content. Also they can't fix bad design. And it should not take 3 weeks and 10 gray hairs to add a tab to a Team. That's a ridiculous proposal.
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41844108 256 Reputation points

2023-05-30T14:37:49.9733333+00:00

I just want to know how to do this, as a user updating content. (or in this case rebuilding the entire team because apparently someone designed it that way)
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